The Collected Ed Gorman Volume 2 - Moving Coffin

by Ed Gorman

  Then he stormed from the tent.

  The priest reluctantly obliged.

  Then he angled his head up to me. “It won’t be the same any more, Doctor.”

  “What won’t?”

  “The camp. Every man in here has now seen his face.” He nodded back to the soldier on the cot. “They’ll never be the same again. I promise you.”

  In the evening, I ate stew and biscuits, and sipped at a small glass of wine. I was, as usual, in the officers’ tent when the priest came and found me.

  For a time, he said nothing beyond his greeting. Simply watched me at my meal, and then stared out the open flap at the camp preparing for evening, the fires in the center of the encampment, the weary men bedding down. Many of them, healed now, would be back in the battle within two days or less.

  “I spent an hour with him this afternoon,” the priest said.

  “The quarantined man?”

  “Yes.” The priest nodded. “Do you know some of the men have visited him five or six times?”

  The way the priest spoke, I sensed he was gloating over the fact that the men were disobeying the General’s orders. “Why don’t the guards stop them?”

  “The guards are in visiting him, too.”

  “The man says nothing. How can it be a visit?”

  “He says nothing with his tongue. He says a great deal with his face.” He paused, eyed me levelly. “I need to tell you something. You’re the only man in this camp who will believe me.” He sounded frantic. I almost felt sorry for him.

  “Tell me what?”

  “The man—he’s not what we think.”

  “No?”

  “No; his face—” He shook his head. “It’s God’s face.”

  “I see.”

  The priest smiled. “I know how I must sound.”

  “You’ve seen a great deal of suffering, Father. It wears on a person.”

  “It’s God’s face. I had a dream last night. The man’s face shows us God’s displeasure with the war. That’s why the men are so moved when they see the man.” He sighed, seeing he was not convincing me. “You say yourself he hasn’t been wounded.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And that all his vital signs seem normal.”

  “True enough, Father.”

  “Yet he’s in some kind of shock.”

  “That seems to be his problem, yes.”

  The priest shook his head. “No, his real problem is that he’s become overwhelmed by the suffering he’s seen in this war—what both sides have done to the other. All the pain. That’s why there’s so much sorrow on his face—and that’s what the men are responding to. The grief on his face is the same grief they feel in their hearts. God’s face.”

  “Once we get him to a real field hospital—”

  And it was then we heard the rifle shots.

  The periphery of the encampment was heavily protected, we’d never heard firing this close.

  The priest and I ran outside.

  General Sullivan stood next to a group of young men with weapons. Several yards ahead, near the edge of the camp, lay three bodies, shadowy in the light of the campfire. One of the fallen men moaned. All three men wore our own gray uniforms.

  Sullivan glowered at me. “Deserters.”

  “But you shot them in the back,” I said.

  “Perhaps you didn’t hear me, Doctor. The men were deserting. They’d packed their belongings and were heading out.”

  One of the young men who’d done the shooting said, “It was the man’s face, sir.”

  Sullivan wheeled on him. “It was what?”

  “The quarantined man, sir. His face. These men said it made them sad and they had to see families back in Missouri, and that they were just going to leave no matter what.”

  “Poppycock,” Sullivan said. “They left because they were cowards.”

  I left to take care of the fallen man who was crying out for help.

  In the middle of the night, I heard more guns being fired. I lay on my cot, knowing it wasn’t Yankees being fired at. It was our own deserters.

  I dressed and went over to the tent where the quarantined man lay. Two young farm boys in ill-fitting gray uniforms stood over him. They might have been mourners standing over a coffin. They said nothing. Just stared at the man.

  In the dim lamplight, I knelt down next to him. His vitals still seemed good, his heartbeat especially. I stood up, next to the two boys, and looked down on him myself. There was nothing remarkable about his face. He could have been any of thousands of men serving on either side.

  Except for the grief.

  This time I felt the tug of it myself, heard in my mind the cries of the dying I’d been unable to save, saw the families and farms and homes destroyed as the war moved across the countryside, heard children crying out for dead parents, and parents sobbing over the bodies of their dead children. It was all there in his face, perfectly reflected, and I thought then of what the priest had said, that this was God’s face, God’s sorrow and displeasure with us.

  The explosion came, then.

  While the two soldiers next to me didn’t seem to hear it at all, I rushed from the tent to the center of camp.

  Several young soldiers stood near the ammunition cache. Someone had set fire to it. Ammunition was exploding everywhere, flares of red and yellow and gas-jet blue against the night. Men everywhere ducked for cover behind wagons and trees and boulders.

  Into this scene, seemingly unafraid and looking like the lead actor in a stage production of King Lear I’d once seen, strode General Sullivan, still tugging on his heavy uniform jacket.

  He went over to the two soldiers who stood, seemingly unfazed, before the ammunition cache. Between explosions I could hear him shouting, “Did you set this fire?”

  And they nodded.

  Sullivan, as much in bafflement as anger, shook his head. He signaled for the guards to come and arrest these men.

  As the soldiers were passing by me, I heard one of them say to a guard, “After I saw his face, I knew I had to do this. I had to do this. I had to stop the war.”

  Within an hour, the flames died and the explosions ceased. The night was almost ominously quiet. There were a few hours before dawn, so I tried to sleep some more.

  I dreamed of Virginia, green Virginia in the spring, and the creek where I’d fished as a boy, and how the sun had felt on my back and arms and head. There was no surgical table in my dream, nor were my shoes soaked with blood.

  Around dawn somebody began shaking me. It was Sullivan’s personal lieutenant. “The priest has been shot. Come quickly, Doctor.”

  I didn’t even dress fully, just pulled on my trousers over the legs of my long underwear.

  A dozen soldiers stood outside the tent looking confused and defeated and sad. I went inside.

  The priest lay in his tent. His cassock had been torn away. A bloody hole made a target-like circle on his stomach.

  Above his cot stood General Sullivan, a pistol in his hand.

  I knelt next to the cot and examined the priest. His vital signs were faint and growing fainter. He had at most a few minutes to live.

  I looked up at the General. “What happened?”

  The General nodded for the lieutenant to leave. The man saluted and then went out into the gray dawn.

  “I had to shoot him,” General Sullivan said.

  I stood up. “You had to shoot a priest?”

  “He was trying to stop me.”

  “From what?”

  Then I noticed for the first time the knife scabbard on the General’s belt. Blood streaked its sides. The hilt of the knife was sticky with blood. So were the General’s hands. I thought of how Yankee troops had begun disfiguring the faces of our dead on the battlefield.

  He said, “I have a war to fight, Doctor. The men—the way they were reacting to the man’s face—” He paused and touched the bloody hilt of the knife. “I took care of him. And the priest came in while I was doing it and w
ent insane. He started hitting me, trying to stop me and—” He looked down at the priest. “I didn’t have any choice, Doctor. I hope you believe me.”

  A few minutes later, the priest died.

  I started to leave the tent. General Sullivan put a hand on my shoulder. “I know you don’t care very much for me, Doctor, but I hope you understand me at least a little. I can’t win a war when men desert and blow up ammunition dumps and start questioning the worthiness of the war itself. I had to do what I did. I hope someday you’ll understand.”

  I went out into the dawn. The air smelled of campfires and coffee. Now the men were busy scurrying around, preparing for war. The way they had been before the man had been brought here in the buckboard.

  I went over to the tent where he was kept and asked the guard to let me inside. “The General said nobody’s allowed inside, Doctor.”

  I shoved the boy aside and strode into the tent.

  The cloth was still over his face, only now it was soaked with blood. I raised the cloth and looked at him. Even for a doctor, the sight was horrible. The General had ripped out his eyes and sawed off his nose. His cheeks carried deep gullies where the knife had been dug in deep.

  He was dead. The shock of the defacement had killed him.

  Sickened, I looked away.

  The flap was thrown back, then, and there stood General Sullivan. “We’re going to bury him now, Doctor.”

  In minutes, the dead soldier was inside a pine box borne up a hill of long grass waving in a chill wind. The rains came, hard rains, before they’d turned even two shovelfuls of earth.

  Then, from a distance over the hill, came the thunder of cannon and the cry of the dying.

  The face that reminded us of what we were doing to each other was no more. It had been made ugly, robbed of its sorrowful beauty.

  He was buried quickly and without benefit of clergy—the priest himself having been buried an hour earlier—and when the ceremony was finished, we returned to camp and war.

  THE LONG SILENCE AFTER

  The flight from Baltimore was bumpy. Not that Neely cared much. Not now.

  At Hertz he asked for a city map. The counter woman, sweet in her chignon and early evening exhaustion, smiled sadly. As if she knew why he’d come here. She gave him the map and a brand new Buick that did not yet smell as if somebody had barfed in it and then covered up the stench with Air-Wick.

  He had one more stop to make. The Fed-Ex office near O’Hare. A package waited there for him. He did not unwrap it until he got back to the car.

  Inside the red white and blue wrapping, inside the well-lined box, he found what he’d sent himself here last night; a snub-nosed .38. From the adjacent small box he took the cartridges. He would never have gotten this stuff through airport security.

  Finally now, he was ready.

  He spent four hours driving. Street names meant nothing. Sometimes faces were white, sometimes black. He wanted a certain section. Three times he stopped at gas stations and described the area. How there was this drugstore on one corner and a Triple-XXX theater directly across the street and (cheap irony here) a big stone Catholic church a couple blocks down.

  Finally, one guy said, Oh, yeah, and told him where he’d find it in relationship to Rogers Park (which was where he was now).

  Around nine, just before he saw the drugstore and the XXX-theater, it started raining. Cold March rain. Beading on the windshield, giving all the neon the look of watercolors.

  He found a parking garage. A black guy who had a big chaw of chewing tobacco kept spitting all the time he was taking the keys. And kind of glaring. Fucking suburban white dudes. Motherfuckers anyway.

  In the front of the XXX-theater was a small shop where you could rent videos and buy various “appliances” (as they are called). He was never comfortable in such places. Probably his strict Lutheran upbringing. These are places of sin.

  The man behind the counter had bad teeth and a wandering left eye. Somehow that was fitting in a place like this.

  He described the woman he was looking for but the counterman immediately shook his head. “Don’t know her, pal.”

  He described the woman a little more but the man shook his head again. “Sorry,” he said exhaling Pall Mall smoke through the brown stubs of his teeth.

  He didn’t expect to get lucky right off, and he sure didn’t. He started at the west end of the street and worked down it: three bars, a massage parlor, a used clothing store, a tiny soup kitchen run by two old nuns, and a bar with a runway for strippers.

  And nothing.

  Sorry, my friend. Sorry, buddy. Sorry, Jack.

  Never seen/heard of her. You know, pal?

  And so then he started on the women themselves.

  Because of the rain, which was steady and cold, they stood in doorways instead of along the curbsides. The thirty-four degree temperature kept them from any cute stuff. No whistling down drivers. No shaking their asses. No jumping into the streets.

  Just huddling in doorways instead. And kind of shivering.

  And it was the same with them: no help.

  He’d describe her and they’d shrug or shake their heads or pretend they were thinking a long moment and go “Nope, ‘fraid not, friend.”

  Only one of them got smart-mouth. She said, “She musta been somethin’ really special, huh?” and all the time was rubbing her knuckles against his crotch.

  Inside his nice respectable topcoat, the .38 was burning a fucking hole.

  Around midnight he stopped in this small diner for coffee and a sandwich. He was tired, he already had sniffles from the cold steady rain, and he had a headache, too. He bought his food and a little aluminum deal of Bufferin and took them right down.

  And then he asked the counter guy—having no hopes really, just asking the guy kind of automatically—and the guy looked at him and said, “Yeah. Betty.”

  “Yes. That’s right. Her name was Betty.”

  Through the fog of four years, through the fog of a liquored-up night: yes, goddamit that’s right, Betty was her name. Betty.

  He asked, “Is she still around?”

  The counter man, long hairy tattooed arms, leaned forward and gave him a kind of queer look. “Oh, yeah, she’s still around.”

  The counter man sounded as if he expected the man to know what he was hinting at.

  “You know where I can find her?”

  The counter man shook his head. “I don’t know if that’d be right, mister.”

  “How come?”

  He shrugged. “Well, she’s sort of a friend of mine.”

  “I see.”

  And from inside his respectable suburban topcoat, he took his long leather wallet and peeled off a twenty and laid it on the counter and felt like fucking Sam Spade. “I’d really like to talk to her tonight.”

  The counter man stared at the twenty. He licked dry lips with an obscene pink tongue. “I see what you mean.”

  “How about it?”

  “She really is kind of a friend of mine.”

  So Sam Spade went back into action. He laid another crisp twenty on the original crisp twenty.

  The tongue came out again. This time he couldn’t watch the counter man. He pretended to be real interested in the coffee inside his cheap chipped cup.

  So of course the counter man gave him her address and told him how to get there.

  Fog. Rain. The sound of his footsteps. You could smell the rotting lumber of this ancient neighborhood now that it was soaked. Little shabby houses packed so close together you couldn’t ride a bicycle between some of them. One-story brick jobs mostly that used to be packed with Slavs. But the Slavs have good factory jobs now so they had moved out and eager scared blacks had taken their place.

  Hers was lime green stucco. Behind a heavy drape a faint light shone.

  He gripped the gun.

  On the sidewalk he stepped in two piles of dogshit. And now the next-door dog—as if to confirm his own existence—started barking.


  He went up the narrow walk to her place.

  He stood under the overhang. The concrete porch had long ago pulled away from the house and was wobbly. He felt as if he were trying to stand up on a capsizing rowboat.

  The door opened. A woman stood there. “Yes?”

  His memory of her was that she’d been much heavier. Much.

  He said, “Betty?”

  “Right.”

  “Betty Malloy?”

  “Right again.” She sounded tired, even weak. “But not the old Betty Malloy.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I ain’t what I used to be.”

  Cryptic as her words were, he thought that they still made sense.

  “I’d like to come in.”

  “Listen, I don’t do that no more, all right?”

  “I’d like to come in anyway.”

  “Why?”

  He sighed. If he pulled the gun here, she might get the chance to slam the door and save herself.

  He had to get inside.

  He put his hand on the knob of the screen door.

  It was latched.

  Sonofabitch.

  “I need to use your phone,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  In some naïve way, he’d expected her to remember who he was. But of course she wouldn’t.

  “Could I use your phone?”

  “For what?”

  “To call Triple-A.”

  “Something’s wrong with your car?”

  “The battery went dead.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “What?”

  “I asked where your car was. I don’t see no new car. And you definitely look like the kind of guy who’d be driving a new car.”

  So he decided screw it and pulled the gun.